We've already seen an earlier and quite successful movie whose distribution was largely funded (if not completely funded) by the producer/director of the movie.
Disney is not blocking the release-- they've given more than a year's notice that Miramax should seek an alternate distributor. So why didn't they?
And I know, of course, why Moore won't pony up the money-- since he'd lose it all. More than likely, Disney knows that documentaries generally don't earn as much as they would cost to promote and distribute (although they've now taken care of the promotion part). Why not just wait and release it on DVD? Probably much more profitable in the long term.
I have spoken to both educators and politicians, and in my opinion, they both believe that by giving students the 'technological edge', they will be better pupils and move farther faster.
No, the teachers have no idea what the students are doing on the computers. No, the teachers rarely have a clue how to even use them effectively. Yes, they think that by setting a child in front of one, and letting them play 'educational games', that learning will be FUN, and therefore better, and therefore the students will learn more.
And politicians find themselves with a very good problem that they can truly throw money at. "Give every child a laptop!" "Every desk should have a computer!", etc.
I swear if the school my kid attends ever starts pushing computers in front of him, I'll switch to homeschooling where I can trust he'll be reading actual books.
We just don't necessarily know of the others. Microsoft had, until recently, been in the business of artificially pushing numbers up my moving revenue from one quarter to another, just to make sure that they always beat the street.
However, they've sworn off that behavior, like, a year ago.
Here is a course I helped design to teach Javascript programming to CS170 students-- pre-business majors.
Javascript was our idea of a language replacement for what we were using True Basic. The idea was to have a language where the students wouldn't constantly question why they were learning it, and to pretend like we were doing some level of web enabled e-commerce site programming.
The problems we have found come from the lack of structure of the language, and combined with the browser's desire to fix as much as it can. While this is a nice feature for a real developer, it sucks when you have to tell a student "I know it works on the browser, but it's still wrong."
The other issue is trying to keep to a small set of structures for programming, and making sure the TAs for the course don't get too ambitious with teaching dozens of alternative ways to accomplish the same thing. For students at this level, they just get confused.
But it does work well, and it is nice not having to ask students to buy another piece of software to program with at home. (Unlike True Basic.)
I like this as a format for a show, and I really hope the Sci-Fi people go with it for Battlestar Gallactica (that way they couldprobably keep the same actors, or skip years every now and then, letting the loss of characters come as 'tearful rememberances'.)
Also, I'd ike to point out that by going with a mini-series format, you could have lots of fun killing off characters, since no one would no who was 'supposed' to stay alive from installment to installment.
I'll also say that the mini-series idea would have worked really well for a pre-trek time like Enterprise was supposed to be, and they could have focused on little minor plots at a time.
But, there are plenty of better universes than Trek, anyway.
There will be fewer people vying for those jobs, according to this.
So, the jobs that will probably be lost are the ones that suck anyway, the ones that require just painful coding line after line of repetive garbage.
The jobs that will be left will be the high-paid positions of QA-- the ones to go through all that garbage written by the lowest bidder and fix it. O the joy we will have.
Are you saying that there isn't any car accidents in US? High-speed train with 200 passengers is much more safe than a 200 cars on a highway.
No, I am most certainly not saying this. I do believe that when these uber-high speed trains are brought online, however, they will be more unsafe per passenger mile than planes, and this will make them nice juicy targets for litigation.
But I thought I'd bring it up. Inevitably there are going to be long threads of why the US doesn't have this leading to conspiracies involving auto manufactures, oil companies, and congessmen payed for by Amtrak.
Before all that gets carried away, a minor side note. There was an article online, and if I find the citation I'll respond to my own post with it, that spoke of why using innerstates as guides for high speed railways was impossible. Basically innerstates have very frequent curves in them, and at the speeds these trains are going, you'd either be making everybody motion sick, or worse, throwing them back and forth inside the train. You need very straight shots for long distances for these to work right.
And, I might add, there's _very_ little incentive to have ultra-high speed trains from a legal perspective. The first time one of these has an accident every blood sucking vermin of a low-life profession would come sniffing around through the remains looking for anyone remotely related to anyone with at least a hangnail to sue the pants off whatever company was running this system.
Numbers that are much harder to get but would be significantly more valuable would be the fraction of web traffic handled by the type of server. Just because I have a hosting company that has 3 sites doesn't mean that I'm getting traffic in the same amount that some other individuals. And MS(make that M$ so I don't get modded down) would tell you that there servers are deployed on the larger installations, the ones that need to higher performance.
(And, I'd expect that if we looked at a graph of traffic, you'd see the GWS getting a significant share.)
I'm kinda in a position to answer at least one part of this question.
CPu's, when idle, can use as little as 2-5W. When fully utilized, up to 40-50W (depending on the make/model/etc). So let's assume you have a middle of the road processor that has a difference of 25W between active and idle. (This is consistant with measurements on a PIII 800MHz, a little lower than middle of the road.)
Now, 25W * 24Hrs * 365 days * 1kw/1000W * $0.10/kWhr = $21/year. Roughly $1/year per Watt of additional power.
As far as breaking of components, as well as the system is cooled properly, I wouldn't think it would be a problem.
"The Methuselah Mouse contest was created in an effort to boost research into human longevity."
Wow! What a concept! Surely there would be no other reason for scientists to look to extend life than a per-day monetary prize! And of course, no scientist would get recognition otherwise! Ponce de Leon may have looked a lot harder if he was just trying to find an old mouse...
Give me a break.
How about having a contest for reasonable solutions to a problem of overpopulation, or, more importantly, a contest to see if there is a politician with enough backbone to raise the retirement age to 100.
(In all seriousness, I'm of the opinion that the retirement age should be set to a value dependant upon the expected lifetime in the society, as well as some level of job availability. Now this formula would be a good thing to reward.)
In only a mild relation to the topic, but in direct response to your post...
My officemate went on Atkins and lost 30 or so pounds. Impressive. I don't think I could give up bread and pasta, however.
So instead I cut out all soda and french fries from my diet. That's it.
Now, I will say I had been consuming between 2 and 3 24oz Bottles of Mountain Dew a day, and would go through a 2 Liter bottle of Dew every other day at home at night. In the month since I quit soda I've probably saved $50 and have lost about 15-20 pounds. And it stays off.
I don't see myself drinking soda (daily) again. Many people on Atkins, do, however, slip back into wanting pizza and bread and rice and pastas. Just realize that whatever change you make to your diet needs to be permanent, and not "until I lose XX pounds".
(2) H-2 + gamma -> H-1 + n (We'll ignore the electrons)
And the alternate one you discuss is either:
(3) H-2 + H-2 -> He-3 + n + gamma
or
(4) H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n + gamma
(I believe this is the one the tokamak project is using. I'm inevitably wrong on this.)
His reaction, from the article description, is probably:
(5) H-1 + H-2 -> H-1 + H-1 + n
I have no evidence to back this up, other than the fact that they never spoke of Helium really being produced, and the lack of tritium in the discussions. By the way, we can also do a some calculations, to determine the Q-value of these reactions: (using This chart of the Nuclides Table.)
Q=(m_init-m_final)c^2 =>
(5) Q= -2.2 MeV In other words, These ionized atoms would have to be travelling quite fast. (It is endothermic after all.)
What about the ones that release energy? How fast do they have to be moving?
Well, from this page we're talking the temperature would have to be between 4 x 10^7 and 4 x 10^8 K, which is kinda hot. You may be able to make a lot of assumptions about the occasional fast moving particle using temperature distribution graphs.
No, but being able to trace back mail to the computer that sent it goes a long way towards accountability. Kinda like having caller ID tell you who it is. When you get "Out Of Area", you know it's a telemarketer. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could know which ones were hanging up on you?
That's the level of accountability I'm referring to, not some sort of "Mother May I" for email. I'd take spam over that system any day.
I'm company A.com, and I buy a certificate (or get one for free from some free-sign authority). I use it completely legitamately. Only for receipts to paying customers, and to deliver "timely updates" for their software or whatever.
Now I fall on hard times. And go broke.
In the liquidation proceedings, a spammer swoops down and buys my certificate. It's a valued commodity to him, and the courts, I don't believe, are not going to care about the nefarious purposes he may have in mind.
But now lots of people are getting spam in my name.
So, would the CA have the power to "ungrant" the certificate, and therefore also be able to hold thousands of companies hostage. (Imagine starting as a 'free' service, and then suddenly 'changing your policy'.)
Or will the clients at the end have to say that certain CA's aren't valid. If so, how is this different form white-list/black-list.
Now, anything that tries to fight spam I am for. However, I believe the number one thing needed is accountability. If someone sends me mail, I need to be able to reach out and touch them, with a phone number or anything else I feel like. And the latest round of email viruses wouldn't work if I couldn't fake the address it was being sent from.
It would be _so_ much better if software was patented. Patents still expire in reasonably short amounts of time, and you could ensure that any software patent had to come with source. Then, after 14 years or so, you have gobs of open source software, as opposed to nearly a century (95 years as current US copyright goes).
1) How readily accessible to the outside world would this info be? Like perspective employers/colleges/etc.
2) Does this get children to accept total monitoring of thier lives, and hence make them less upset when a TIA project wants to get started in the future?
Of course having Linux in Public Schools will make Linux appear everywhere. Just look at Apple's success with the same strategy.
The problem becomes one of kids thinking that Linux is a "training" computer environment, and that when they "grow up" they get to use a real environment.
Actually, the question would be, "After the Titanic, why do we have icebergs?"
Re:Red Dwarf fans?
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But on the topic of time perception, couldn't machines do just the opposite if bored? Nothing would be stopping thme from underclocking themselves. In the case of Holly, why not go with one clock cycle per week for a while?
And in the case of any system, if it finds itself bored, just slow down. That would be one distinct advantage they would have over us. Imaginge being able to truly slow down your mind so you could actually enjoy stupid movie plots.
The Forbin Project
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A very good movie about what happens with an AI. Some not-so-good explanations or reasoning at parts, but other than that, I found it very interesting.
The most interesting part was the computer's complete lack of care about being a human. No desire to be like us in the least. It's only overriding goal, presumably because it had been started with it in mind, was maintining the peace.
"It can be a peace of plenty and content, or a peace of unburied dead: the choice is yours."
It was very Machivellian in its approach to solving problems, and quite ordered in its actions. It also was undefeatable.
I guess this is in the "AI as God" mentality, but I really didn't see it preseneted quite like that. More like an immortal dictator with its hand on the button.
Slashdot Mirror
We've already seen an earlier and quite successful movie whose distribution was largely funded (if not completely funded) by the producer/director of the movie.
Disney is not blocking the release-- they've given more than a year's notice that Miramax should seek an alternate distributor. So why didn't they?
And I know, of course, why Moore won't pony up the money-- since he'd lose it all. More than likely, Disney knows that documentaries generally don't earn as much as they would cost to promote and distribute (although they've now taken care of the promotion part). Why not just wait and release it on DVD? Probably much more profitable in the long term.
I have spoken to both educators and politicians, and in my opinion, they both believe that by giving students the 'technological edge', they will be better pupils and move farther faster.
No, the teachers have no idea what the students are doing on the computers. No, the teachers rarely have a clue how to even use them effectively. Yes, they think that by setting a child in front of one, and letting them play 'educational games', that learning will be FUN, and therefore better, and therefore the students will learn more.
And politicians find themselves with a very good problem that they can truly throw money at. "Give every child a laptop!" "Every desk should have a computer!", etc.
I swear if the school my kid attends ever starts pushing computers in front of him, I'll switch to homeschooling where I can trust he'll be reading actual books.
We just don't necessarily know of the others. Microsoft had, until recently, been in the business of artificially pushing numbers up my moving revenue from one quarter to another, just to make sure that they always beat the street.
However, they've sworn off that behavior, like, a year ago.
'than some obscure acronym like "PTODPTTBIBT"'
Which could be pronounced "pbhthtth!"
Imagine the fun of Doctors telling patients the surgery they'll need. "Well, it's an experiemental surgery. We just say -pbhththh-."
I use xosd, and use the "pipe message to command", combined with a shell script that does:
Alert "$1: $(sed -n '/^Subject:/{s/Subject://;p;q;}' )"
(Alert is my xosd program that pops up messages onto the terminal)
Give me a pipe and I shall script the world!
Here is a course I helped design to teach Javascript programming to CS170 students-- pre-business majors.
Javascript was our idea of a language replacement for what we were using True Basic. The idea was to have a language where the students wouldn't constantly question why they were learning it, and to pretend like we were doing some level of web enabled e-commerce site programming.
The problems we have found come from the lack of structure of the language, and combined with the browser's desire to fix as much as it can. While this is a nice feature for a real developer, it sucks when you have to tell a student "I know it works on the browser, but it's still wrong."
The other issue is trying to keep to a small set of structures for programming, and making sure the TAs for the course don't get too ambitious with teaching dozens of alternative ways to accomplish the same thing. For students at this level, they just get confused.
But it does work well, and it is nice not having to ask students to buy another piece of software to program with at home. (Unlike True Basic.)
I like this as a format for a show, and I really hope the Sci-Fi people go with it for Battlestar Gallactica (that way they couldprobably keep the same actors, or skip years every now and then, letting the loss of characters come as 'tearful rememberances'.)
Also, I'd ike to point out that by going with a mini-series format, you could have lots of fun killing off characters, since no one would no who was 'supposed' to stay alive from installment to installment.
I'll also say that the mini-series idea would have worked really well for a pre-trek time like Enterprise was supposed to be, and they could have focused on little minor plots at a time.
But, there are plenty of better universes than Trek, anyway.
Well actually, the last book in the series actually has the line "Continuing to redefine the meaning of the word trilogy." .
There will be fewer people vying for those jobs, according to
this.
So, the jobs that will probably be lost are the ones that suck anyway, the ones that require just painful coding line after line of repetive garbage.
The jobs that will be left will be the high-paid positions of QA-- the ones to go through all that garbage written by the lowest bidder and fix it. O the joy we will have.
Are you saying that there isn't any car accidents in US? High-speed train with 200 passengers is much more safe than a 200 cars on a highway.
No, I am most certainly not saying this. I do believe that when these uber-high speed trains are brought online, however, they will be more unsafe per passenger mile than planes, and this will make them nice juicy targets for litigation.
But I thought I'd bring it up. Inevitably there are going to be long threads of why the US doesn't have this leading to conspiracies involving auto manufactures, oil companies, and congessmen payed for by Amtrak.
Before all that gets carried away, a minor side note. There was an article online, and if I find the citation I'll respond to my own post with it, that spoke of why using innerstates as guides for high speed railways was impossible. Basically innerstates have very frequent curves in them, and at the speeds these trains are going, you'd either be making everybody motion sick, or worse, throwing them back and forth inside the train. You need very straight shots for long distances for these to work right.
And, I might add, there's _very_ little incentive to have ultra-high speed trains from a legal perspective. The first time one of these has an accident every blood sucking vermin of a low-life profession would come sniffing around through the remains looking for anyone remotely related to anyone with at least a hangnail to sue the pants off whatever company was running this system.
Numbers that are much harder to get but would be significantly more valuable would be the fraction of web traffic handled by the type of server. Just because I have a hosting company that has 3 sites doesn't mean that I'm getting traffic in the same amount that some other individuals. And MS(make that M$ so I don't get modded down) would tell you that there servers are deployed on the larger installations, the ones that need to higher performance.
(And, I'd expect that if we looked at a graph of traffic, you'd see the GWS getting a significant share.)
I'm kinda in a position to answer at least one part of this question.
CPu's, when idle, can use as little as 2-5W. When fully utilized, up to 40-50W (depending on the make/model/etc). So let's assume you have a middle of the road processor that has a difference of 25W between active and idle. (This is consistant with measurements on a PIII 800MHz, a little lower than middle of the road.)
Now, 25W * 24Hrs * 365 days * 1kw/1000W * $0.10/kWhr = $21/year. Roughly $1/year per Watt of additional power.
As far as breaking of components, as well as the system is cooled properly, I wouldn't think it would be a problem.
"The Methuselah Mouse contest was created in an effort to boost research into human longevity."
Wow! What a concept! Surely there would be no other reason for scientists to look to extend life than a per-day monetary prize! And of course, no scientist would get recognition otherwise! Ponce de Leon may have looked a lot harder if he was just trying to find an old mouse...
Give me a break.
How about having a contest for reasonable solutions to a problem of overpopulation, or, more importantly, a contest to see if there is a politician with enough backbone to raise the retirement age to 100.
(In all seriousness, I'm of the opinion that the retirement age should be set to a value dependant upon the expected lifetime in the society, as well as some level of job availability. Now this formula would be a good thing to reward.)
In only a mild relation to the topic, but in direct response to your post...
My officemate went on Atkins and lost 30 or so pounds. Impressive. I don't think I could give up bread and pasta, however.
So instead I cut out all soda and french fries from my diet. That's it.
Now, I will say I had been consuming between 2 and 3 24oz Bottles of Mountain Dew a day, and would go through a 2 Liter bottle of Dew every other day at home at night. In the month since I quit soda I've probably saved $50 and have lost about 15-20 pounds. And it stays off.
I don't see myself drinking soda (daily) again. Many people on Atkins, do, however, slip back into wanting pizza and bread and rice and pastas. Just realize that whatever change you make to your diet needs to be permanent, and not "until I lose XX pounds".
More specifically, you mean to write:
.)
(1) H-2 + H-2 -> He-4 + gammas
Or,
(2) H-2 + gamma -> H-1 + n (We'll ignore the electrons)
And the alternate one you discuss is either:
(3) H-2 + H-2 -> He-3 + n + gamma
or
(4) H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n + gamma
(I believe this is the one the tokamak project is using. I'm inevitably wrong on this.)
His reaction, from the article description, is probably:
(5) H-1 + H-2 -> H-1 + H-1 + n
I have no evidence to back this up, other than the fact that they never spoke of Helium really being produced, and the lack of tritium in the discussions. By the way, we can also do a some calculations, to determine the Q-value of these reactions: (using This chart of the Nuclides Table
Q=(m_init-m_final)c^2 =>
(5) Q= -2.2 MeV In other words, These ionized atoms would have to be travelling quite fast. (It is endothermic after all.)
What about the ones that release energy? How fast do they have to be moving?
Well, from this page we're talking the temperature would have to be between 4 x 10^7 and 4 x 10^8 K, which is kinda hot. You may be able to make a lot of assumptions about the occasional fast moving particle using temperature distribution graphs.
And I second this sentiment.
While peace may be the absence of war, the absence of war is not peace.
That's a bit of a paraphrased quote, but I'm hoping it gets the point across.
No, but being able to trace back mail to the computer that sent it goes a long way towards accountability. Kinda like having caller ID tell you who it is. When you get "Out Of Area", you know it's a telemarketer. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could know which ones were hanging up on you?
That's the level of accountability I'm referring to, not some sort of "Mother May I" for email. I'd take spam over that system any day.
I'm company A.com, and I buy a certificate (or get one for free from some free-sign authority). I use it completely legitamately. Only for receipts to paying customers, and to deliver "timely updates" for their software or whatever.
Now I fall on hard times. And go broke.
In the liquidation proceedings, a spammer swoops down and buys my certificate. It's a valued commodity to him, and the courts, I don't believe, are not going to care about the nefarious purposes he may have in mind.
But now lots of people are getting spam in my name.
So, would the CA have the power to "ungrant" the certificate, and therefore also be able to hold thousands of companies hostage. (Imagine starting as a 'free' service, and then suddenly 'changing your policy'.)
Or will the clients at the end have to say that certain CA's aren't valid. If so, how is this different form white-list/black-list.
Now, anything that tries to fight spam I am for. However, I believe the number one thing needed is accountability. If someone sends me mail, I need to be able to reach out and touch them, with a phone number or anything else I feel like. And the latest round of email viruses wouldn't work if I couldn't fake the address it was being sent from.
It would be _so_ much better if software was patented. Patents still expire in reasonably short amounts of time, and you could ensure that any software patent had to come with source. Then, after 14 years or so, you have gobs of open source software, as opposed to nearly a century (95 years as current US copyright goes).
Just a thought.
1) How readily accessible to the outside world would this info be? Like perspective employers/colleges/etc.
2) Does this get children to accept total monitoring of thier lives, and hence make them less upset when a TIA project wants to get started in the future?
Of course having Linux in Public Schools will make Linux appear everywhere. Just look at Apple's success with the same strategy.
The problem becomes one of kids thinking that Linux is a "training" computer environment, and that when they "grow up" they get to use a real environment.
After Titanic, how come we still have ships?
Actually, the question would be, "After the Titanic, why do we have icebergs?"
But on the topic of time perception, couldn't machines do just the opposite if bored? Nothing would be stopping thme from underclocking themselves. In the case of Holly, why not go with one clock cycle per week for a while?
And in the case of any system, if it finds itself bored, just slow down. That would be one distinct advantage they would have over us. Imaginge being able to truly slow down your mind so you could actually enjoy stupid movie plots.
A very good movie about what happens with an AI. Some not-so-good explanations or reasoning at parts, but other than that, I found it very interesting.
The most interesting part was the computer's complete lack of care about being a human. No desire to be like us in the least. It's only overriding goal, presumably because it had been started with it in mind, was maintining the peace.
"It can be a peace of plenty and content, or a peace of unburied dead: the choice is yours."
It was very Machivellian in its approach to solving problems, and quite ordered in its actions. It also was undefeatable.
I guess this is in the "AI as God" mentality, but I really didn't see it preseneted quite like that. More like an immortal dictator with its hand on the button.